Programmed Cell Death vs. Cell Growth

Today, cancer research is undergoing a paradigm shift. For a century, the prevailing thought was that cancer grew quicker than normal cells; hence, the way to treat malignant cells was to stop their growth. More recent advances in our understanding of cancer biology have shown that cancer cells do not grow faster than normal cells, but instead, fail to die on schedule. Cancer cells escape the normal process of programmed cell death.

When programmed cell death is disrupted, transformed malignant cells fail to die. This causes cancer cells to accumulate into what we recognize as tumors. Thus, drugs and therapies must be designed to trigger cell death rather than prohibit uncontrolled growth.

By incorporating this new understanding into the design of our assay platforms, we have developed “functional profiling" as a technique that accurately recognizes those drugs and combinations that induce programmed cell death in your tumor.